关于流媒体，大流行教会了我们什么?

When the first government requirement to stay at home was issued, everyone in the streaming industry probably held their collective breath. First, because they knew that after one stay-at-home order, there would be more. 第二，因为这意味着人们要做 很多 更多的流.

Although there was probably some trepidation about the idea of 很多s of people streaming a 很多 of content a 很多 of the day, most big platform operators (and even those launching during the pandemic, 像迪斯尼+, HBO马克斯, Quibi, and Peacock) had already planned their services to accommodate the traffic bursts associated with sudden demand. 事实上, 大多数流媒体服务提供商, 尤其是那些经营网络的公司, most likely have specific people whose sole job is to plan for capacity needs that reflect both current and future demand. I am sure none of those capacity-planning engineers predicted everyone staying home and streaming 24/7 for several months, but they still planned for both logical growth and sudden spikes. 因此，至少在美国是这样.S. 市场上，网络发展得很好.

But network capacity is only one part of the streaming workflow. 不像广播工作流程, in which technologies are connected via several standards, a streaming workflow is a hodgepodge of technologies stitched together through middleware and other custom code. 在很多情况下, when streaming providers employ open source software within their operations, customizations may be responsible for one streaming component being able to communicate with another. 和, 当然, 还有像Netflix这样的公司, which has built a 很多 of its streaming infrastructure from the ground up. The kind of custom and proprietary technology development often necessary to enable streaming workflows is both a blessing and a curse. It provides immense flexibility for streaming providers to design and build workflows that meet their specific requirements (product functionality, 盈利机制, 等.). 但它也暴露了这些工作流的脆弱性. 自定义编码器可能会阻塞. 多元技术栈, 喜欢安全, can become real-time bottlenecks as traffic exceeds the capacity of the software, 或者服务器, 它的工作原理.

这就回到了本专栏的标题.

What we've learned is that the internet is not going to break, but network operators have to remain vigilant about bandwidth consumption (as evidenced by the 欧盟对流媒体运营商的要求, like Netflix and YouTube, to lower video quality while stay-at-home orders remained in effect). The amount of streaming we’ve seen since the beginning of the pandemic is not an outlier use case. 在某一时刻，这将成为新常态. 和 network operators will need to upgrade equipment to ensure they have the necessary capacity to support it.

What we also learned, though, is that the network is not where the real issues will lie. 他们会在别的地方, 意想不到的组件, like authorization web applications installed on web servers, which were not configured for the kind of traffic they’ve seen. It is easy to tip over a web server when it’s only able to support 1 million concurrent requests per hour but is receiving 10 million. What we learned is that streaming is a combination of both hardware and software and that the machines on which the server is installed to provide streaming workflow functionality must be built to support the kind of demand they will be subjected to. 最糟糕的是 你能做的就是建立边缘缓存, 例如, that are not optimized or balanced to maximize throughput and performance during high demand or for specific traffic profiles (downloaded content requires different server configurations than segmented streaming to produce optimized performance).

我们学到的是，我们还有工作要做. Not because things broke, but because we saw a vision of the streaming future that has given us 主动而不是被动的机会, 在我们知道即将到来的弯道前保持领先.